Night Terrace Season One

A female Doctor Who for a universal audience has all the makings of an audio drama for the ages. Fans of the time traveling doctor will love Night Terrace and its cast of zany characters. One of them — the protagonist — being a retired time lord.

There’s a lot of tying up of story elements in the first two episodes, giving the initial impression of a purely episodic audio drama. That is, one adventure after another with no real continuity between them.

By the third episode there’s a stronger sense of an underlying story and things get a lot more interesting. In fact episode three was the best episode out of the eight episode first season. If you enjoy a good mystery mixed with time traveling tropes, you’ll love episode three.

The rest of the series is hit or miss. The interest in the story goes up or down and reaches its peak around the episode title “Sound & Führer.” During the final episode, things get complicated. Overly complicated, in fact. It’s filled with jargon and terms most people would scratch their heads over, trying to figure out what it meant.

Where this work truly shines is the comedy and the dynamics between characters. It may not be everyone’s flavor of comedy, but if you like Dr. Who, you’ll probably get a chuckle. The humor — based on my slight exposure to the Doctor’s stories (at least when compared to the true fans) — is similar. That being said, the humor here is simple, but effective. Aside from the first episode, there wasn’t a single adventure I didn’t laugh out loud at least once during its duration.

The conclusion of the first season is lackluster at best, sacrificing a potentially good ending with one that is safe. Overall the season as a whole is average, even though many of the individual episodes are filled with good ideas and funny lines of dialogue.